Of the 724 women who contested the 2019 general elections, 78 will be sworn in as members of parliament (MPs)–the largest-ever contingent of women in India’s parliamentary history. More than 60%, or 47 of these women, are first-time MPs, said Gilles Verniers, co-director of Trivedi Centre for Political Data (TCPD).  Some, such as eight-time winner Maneka Gandhi, are veterans.

There are billionaires–the richest being Hema Malini of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with assets of Rs 250 crore, according to the Association of Democratic Reforms. And then there is Remya Haridas, the daughter of a daily-wager father and a tailor mother. With assets of Rs 22,816, the 32-year-old is Kerala’s second-ever Dalit woman MP and the only woman MP from the state this year.

Reportedly shortlisted in a talent hunt conducted by Congress president Rahul Gandhi back in 2011, the music graduate contested as a candidate for the Congress-led United Democratic Front, conducting a campaign that used music and singing to connect with her audience.

Haridas’s political rivals scoffed. But on counting day, she had defeated incumbent P.K. Biju of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or the CPI(M), by securing 52.4% of the vote share.

One step forward…

In percentage terms, the gains made by women in the 2019 general elections are small: they form 14.6% of the house, up from the 12.1% (66 women MPs) of the outgoing 16th Lok Sabha.

“You cannot bring change immediately,” Chinta Anuradha, who describes herself as a “staunch supporter of the feminist cause” and won on a YSR Congress ticket from Amalapuram in Andhra Pradesh, told IndiaSpend. “But women are now getting into politics from different streams and are being taken seriously by political parties. That is a good start and we will very soon reach our rightful numbers in parliament.”

All four women candidates fielded by the YSR Congress in Andhra Pradesh have won–two of them, including Anuradha, for the first time.

In Odisha, the Biju Janata Dal (BJD)’s decision–unprecedented before this election for any party–to reserve 33% of its parliamentary seats for women candidates, has paid rich dividends with electoral victory for five of its seven women candidates. These include Chandrani Murmu, a BTech graduate who on counting day was, at 25 years, 8 months and 11 days, the youngest woman MP to be elected this year. Murmu won on a BJD ticket from Keonjhar, defeating her nearest rival, two-time MP Ananta Nayak of the BJP, by more than 66,000 votes.  

Along with two women MPs from the BJP, Aparajita Sarangi from Bhubaneshwar and Sangeeta Singh Deo from Bolangir, seven of Odisha’s 21 MPs are now women, representing a quantum leap for women’s representation from 9.5% in 2014 to 33.3% in 2019.

Source: Analysis by BehanBox, an upcoming digital platform for gender issues based on data from TCPD. Note: Does not include Tripura and Meghalaya, where one of two MPs each (50%) is a woman.

The reverse has happened in West Bengal, where despite All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) chief Mamata Banerjee allocating 41% of all seats (22 tickets) to women, the proportion of women MPs has shrunk from 28.6% in 2014 to 26.2% this election.

Despite this, West Bengal remains a significant state for women’s representation with 12 of its 42 MPs women–two from the BJP and 10 from the TMC, including Mahua Moitra, a former investment banker who returned from London in 2008 to join politics and once showed her middle finger to news anchor Arnab Goswami, then with Times Now.

Moitra has since involved herself in privacy issues, filing a public interest litigation against the Narendra Modi government’s proposal to monitor the social media.

Despite the euphoria caused by the ‘highest number of women ever elected to the Lok Sabha’, 13 states and union territories have in 2019 failed to elect a single woman candidate.

These ‘zero women MP’ states include Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir and Goa. In the union territories of Dadra and Nagar Haveli as well as Daman and Diu there was no woman candidate in the first place.

Source: Election Commission of India data on 2019 Lok Sabha results analysed by IndiaSpend.

In Mizoram, history was made when a woman contested parliamentary elections for the first time. Lalthlamuani said she had received a “signal from God” and contested as an independent candidate. The 63-year-old runs an NGO, Chhinlung Israel People Convention, which comprises of Mizo Jews who believe they are one of the 10 lost tribes of Israel. On counting day she had polled 1,975 or 0.4% of the votes.

Of the 14 MPs of Assam, one is a woman. But the Gauhati parliamentary seat saw a spirited contest with five women among its 17 candidates.

In the end, former Guwahati mayor Queen Oja, who contested on a BJP ticket, defeated her nearest rival, the Congress’s Bobbeeta Sharma, a well-known name in Assamese TV and films who, by virtue of once winning a beauty contest in Assam, invited some ‘Queen vs Beauty Queen’ headlines. Oja’s victory by a margin of more than 5.5 lakh votes makes her the first woman to represent her constituency since 1977.

“Nowadays women are aware about politics but not so active,” Oja said to IndiaSpend over the phone. “To come up, women need the support of their families and communities. But first they must get involved in society and community issues.”

A glass ceiling was also broken in Arunachal Pradesh, which saw a woman contest a parliamentary seat for the first time. Jarjum Ete contested from Arunachal West on a Janata Dal (Secular) ticket but was defeated by the sitting MP and BJP minister Kiren Rijiju who got 63.2% of the vote share compared to Ete’s 11.95%.

Of the two seats in Meghalaya, Tura has been won by Agatha Sangma, another dynast who is the 38-year-old daughter of the deceased P.A.Sangma, a former Lok Sabha speaker. This is her third electoral victory since she first won a by-election to the 14th Lok Sabha.

The north-east remained male dominated, with its 25 constituencies spread over eight states collectively electing three women–one more than in 2014.

Some northeastern states, Manipur for instance, had no woman candidate. Nagaland has never elected a woman to its state assembly (legislature). Its sole woman MP has been the late Reno Mese Shaize.

Losing big

Some notable losses for women candidates include Aam Aadmi Party’s Atishi, an educator and activist, who managed 17.44% of the vote share in her East Delhi constituency. In a three-way contest between the BJP, Congress and her own party, Atishi came in third after the BJP’s Gautam Gambhir (55.35%) and the Congress’s Arvinder Singh Lovely (24.24% vote share).

In Silchar, Assam, the Congress’s Sushmita Dev lost to the BJP’s Rajdeep Roy by 81,596 votes. Dev is a long-time advocate for 33% reservation for women in parliament and in state assemblies (legislatures).

The BJP’s Jaya Prada, a former actor who faced a sexist campaign by her nearest rival, Samajwadi Party’s Azam Khan, lost Rampur by more than one lakh votes. And the Congress’s Kumari Selja was defeated in Ambala, Haryana, by 3.42 lakh votes by the BJP’s Rattan Lal Kataria.
Several women lost to stronger women candidates–Tamilisai Soundararajan of the BJP to DMK’s Kanimozhi Karunanidhi, and TMC’s Ratna De to the BJP’s Locket Chatterjee.

In at least 50 constituencies, women stood second, shows an analysis of the results of all candidates on the Election Commission of India website.

In three of these constituencies the margin of defeat was less than 10,000 votes. Mamtaz Sanghamita of TMC lost in Bardhaman-Durgapur, West Bengal, by 2,439 votes. In Koraput, Odisha, the margin of Kausalya Hikaka’s defeat was 3,613 votes. And in Maldaha Dakshin, also in West Bengal, BJP’s Sreerupa Mitra Chaudhury lost by 8,222 votes.

Dynasts

As usual, the new batch of women MPs includes dynasts. Overall, 30% of all new Lok Sabha MPs belong to political families but women candidates this election were more dynastic at 41%, said political analysts Gilles Verniers and Christophe Jaffrelot in The Indian Express on May 27, 2019. All the women candidates fielded by the Samajwadi Party, Telugu Desam Party, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and Telangana Rashtra Samithi are dynasts, they pointed out.

In two states, Punjab and Maharashtra, all the women MPs are dynasts.

Harsimrat Kaur Badal, the wife of former Punjab chief minister Sukhbir Singh Badal–who, after Hema Malini, is the richest woman MP with assets worth Rs 217 crore–has retained her Bathinda seat. The Congress’s Preneet Kaur, wife of current Chief Minister Amarinder Singh, has won back her Patiala seat, which she had lost in 2014, by winning 45.17% of the vote share.

All eight of the women who have won from Maharashtra claim political lineage. The daughter of NCP chief Sharad Pawar, Supriya Sule, for instance, will be making her third entry into parliament as the MP from Baramati, her father’s old constituency.

Two of the newly elected women dynast MPs from Maharashtra are related to each other. Poonam Mahajan is the daughter of slain BJP leader Pramod Mahajan. She defeated her nearest rival, Priya Dutt – incidentally, a fellow dynast and daughter of former Congress minister Sunil Dutt — in Mumbai North Central with a decisive 53.97% of the vote share. Poonam’s cousin, Pritam Munde, is the daughter of Gopinath Munde who was married to Pramod Mahajan’s sister. Pritam contested on a BJP ticket from Beed and, like her cousin, won with more than 50% of the vote share.

All dynasts did not win. Perhaps most notably, Samajwadi Party’s Dimple Yadav, the wife of former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav, lost in Kannauj by a narrow margin of 12,353 votes to the BJP’s Subrat Pathak.

Breakthrough newbies

And then there are newbies who have worked their way up through grassroots leadership. Pramila Bishoyi, 69, studied only until class 2, speaks no Hindi or English, has never stepped outside Odisha and has two sons, one of whom runs a tea-stall.

Yet, it was for her success in launching a women’s self-help group in his constituency of Aska that Biju Janata Dal (BJD) head Naveen Patnaik asked her to contest from the constituency from where he had launched his own political career 20 years ago.

The story goes that soon after elections were announced, Bishoyi’s son got a call saying that the chief minister wanted to meet his mother, so could she please come to Bhubaneshwar, some 160 km away? There was no money for taxi fare, so he demurred. A few hours later, a car drove up to bring her to the state capital where she was given the ticket.

When the votes were counted, Bishoyi had won 54.52%, defeating her nearest rival, the BJP’s Anita Subhadarshini, by more than two lakh votes.

‘Giant killers’

While the term ‘giant-killer’ is being used to describe BJP’s Smriti Irani who defeated Congress President Rahul Gandhi in Amethi by 55,120 votes, there are at least three more among women MPs.

The most famous is terror accused Pragya Singh Thakur, who praised Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse as a “desh bhakt” (patriot). Her words caused a few blushes for the BJP’s leadership, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, “[I]n my heart, I cannot forgive her.” Yet, on counting day, she had wrested the Bhopal seat with a decisive 61.54% vote share from her nearest rival, Congress veteran Digvijay Singh, who managed 35.63%, losing by 3.64 lakh votes.

In Tamil Nadu, Jothimani Sennimalai, an award-winning writer and poet who contested on a Congress ticket, defeated M. Thambidurai of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) by more than 4.2 lakh votes to become the first woman MP from Karur.

In Karnataka’s Mandya, Sumalatha Ambareesh, the widow of former actor and Congress MP M.H. Ambareesh, was denied a Congress ticket, and so contested as an independent. She defeated her nearest rival, Nikhil Kumaraswamy of the Janata Dal (Secular), who is the son of former chief minister H.D. Kumaraswamy and grandson of former prime minister H.D. Deve Gowda, by more than 1.25 lakh votes.

(Bhandare is a Delhi-based journalist who writes frequently on gender issues confronting India.)

Courtesy: India Spend

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Farhuna (right) is the sarpanch of Hussainpur village in Haryana’s Nuh district. An arts graduate, Farhuna makes rotis on a chulha for her extended family of 22.

Hunched over the small chulha (earthen stove) in the family house at Hussainpur village in Haryana’s Nuh district, her hands efficiently slapping a small piece of dough into a round roti, Farhuna (she uses one name),  smiled when she recalled the circumstances of her marriage–and election.

It was early in 2016. The panchayat elections were around the corner and the Haryana government had recently introduced a new eligibility condition. To contest the elections, women needed to prove that they had cleared their eighth standard exams; men had to be matriculates.

That year, the seat at Hussainpur was reserved for women. The problem: No woman in her husband’s family had ever been to school.
So Farhuna’s father-in-law began looking for a bride for his son. His only condition: Education. “He didn’t even take any dowry,” grinned Farhuna, proud holder of a bachelor of arts degree.

The family has a gas stove over which the vegetables and dal are made. But rotis taste better when they come out of a mud stove, and that is how they are made–some 70 of them for the afternoon and an equal number for the night meal–said Farhuna.

Between the roti-making and taking care of her six-month-old daughter, there isn’t much time for the sarpanch (village head) to attend panchayat meetings. Moreover, two sisters-in-law are to be married in a few weeks’ time, so the two-storey house is being painted and there is no time to step out of the house. So, said Farhuna, her father-in-law by and large attends to panchayat matters.

But when she can make the time, Farhuna attends meetings. “I’ve got roads made and I alone look at the problems with the government school in the village. That is my area of interest,” she said.

Low political representation is a problem at every level. Currently, only four of 543, or 0.7% members of the outgoing Lok Sabha are Muslim women, who comprise 6.9% of the general population.

Five Lok Sabhas since Independence had no Muslim women members

Five of the 16 Lok Sabhas since Independence have had no Muslim women members, and their number never crossed four in the 543-seat lower house of parliament.

India has 14 Muslim-majority Lok Sabha constituencies, according to this November 2018 report by Mayank Mishra in The Quint. In addition, there are 13 constituencies where Muslims comprise more than 40% of the population. There are a total of 101 seats where Muslims make up more than 20% of the population.

Muslims comprise 14.3% of the population, according to Census 2011, but only 22 of 543 members of parliament (MPs)–over 4%–in the outgoing Lok Sabha are Muslim.

Partly, this is because mainstream political parties are reluctant to filed Muslim candidates. In 2009, only 30 of 543 MPs (5.52%) were Muslim, according to an analysis by Christophe Jaffrelot, French scholar and columnist, published in Seminar, a monthly journal published out of New Delhi. That election saw only 832 Muslim candidates, of which nearly half or 47.12% contested as independents.

Things weren’t much better in 2014 when 320 of 3,245 candidates (9.8%) who contested the general election were Muslim. The BJP fielded just seven Muslim candidates out of 428 (or 2%), Jaffrelot wrote in the March 2019 book Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India. None won. The Congress fielded 27 Muslim candidates out of 462–less than 6% of the total and fewer than the 31 it had endorsed in 2009.

Amongst non-Muslim parties, only the Samajwadi Party (SP), the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) fielded more than 15% Muslim candidates–at 18.4%, 20.7%, and 15%, respectively.

But Muslim women face a double bind–discriminated against both as women and as Muslims. “In terms of cumulative discrimination–being a Muslim and being a woman–there is a compounding effect for sure,” said Gilles Verniers, a political science professor at Ashoka University and co-director of the Trivedi Centre for Political Data (TCPD). “The usual barriers to entry that apply to all women, apply even more strongly to Muslim women.”

Despite evidence of an increasing number of women candidates, five of the 16 Lok Sabhas since Independence, including the first one, have had no Muslim women MPs, and at its best, the figure has never crossed four.

Source: Lok Sabha, Trivedi Centre for Political Data, Indian Legislators Dataset

“The candidacy of Muslim women has been abysmal ever since Independence and over time, the problem has worsened,” said Zoya Hasan, retired professor emerita at Jawaharlal Nehru University. “The dominant party, the right-wing, is determined to exclude Muslims from political representation and puts up very few candidates. Amongst these, Muslim women are even fewer in number.”

Amongst the candidates announced so far, the BJP has fielded just one Muslim woman. Mafuja Khatoon is contesting from Jangipur, West Bengal and is the first-ever Muslim woman candidate fielded by the BJP for the Lok Sabha.

The outgoing Lok Sabha initially had only two women MPs: Mamtaz Sanghamita, a doctor and first-time MP of the All India Trinamool Congress (popularly abbreviated to TMC), and Mausam Noor of the Congress, a two-term MP from Maldaha. Two Muslim women became MPs only in 2018 in separate by-elections: Sajda Ahmed, from the TMC was elected in February 2018 while Tabassum Hasan, who had represented Kairana, Uttar Pradesh, as a Bahujan Samaj Party MP in 2009, won her second term in a May 2018 by-election from the seat on a Rashtriya Lok Dal ticket.

An early analysis by TCPD of candidates for the first phase of the 2019 general elections found 111 women amongst 1,279 candidates. Just two of these women are Muslim. In phase two, there were 156 women amongst 1,202 candidates analysed by TCPD. Of these, seven–two each from the TMC and the Congress, and one each from the RJD, BJP and SP–are Muslim.

‘They are banning triple talaq but killing our men. How does that make any sense?’
The question of representation becomes significant at a time when Muslim women’s issues, particularly on instant triple talaq, are seen as a red letter issue by political parties.

The Triple Talaq bill, which makes instant triple talaq a criminal offence with provisions for a three-year jail term and a fine, was passed by the Lok Sabha in December last year after debates: Prominent speakers for the bill included Ravi Shankar Prasad, Smriti Irani and Meenakshi Lekhi of the BJP, while Ranjeet Ranjan, Mallikarjun Kharge and Sushmita Dev from the Congress spoke opposing it. Conspicuous by its absence was the voice of the Muslim woman.

“I personally don’t know a single woman who was divorced through instant triple talaq,” said sarpanch Farhuna. “It does not happen in our village.”

Are Muslim women likely to vote for the BJP because of its stand on triple talaq? “By banning triple talaq, the government has done a good thing,” said Farhuna. “But instant triple talaq is anyway not permitted in Islam and the government should not interfere in our religion.”

Women will vote according to their marzi, or choice, she added, but issues like mob lynching are likely to weigh on their minds.

The grave of Pehlu Khan in Jaisinghpur village in Haryana’s Nuh district. In April 2017, Khan was beaten to death on the suspicion that he was smuggling cows. Issues like mob lynching are likely to weigh on the minds of Muslim women voters, Farhuna says.

In Nuh itself, the murders in cow-related violence of Pehlu Khan, Rakbar Khan and Umar Khan hang like a pall of gloom. In Uned village, Jameela, who said she is 75 or 80 years old and is completely illiterate, tends to the family’s buffaloes. “We are dairy farmers but are scared to buy cows. We cannot even buy buffaloes from outside our own area,” she said. “Anyone can stop you on the way back.”

Will the ban on triple talaq by the Supreme Court in August 2017 work in the BJP’s favour? Seated on her string charpoy, Jameela looked down and said, “They are banning triple talaq but killing our men. How does that make any sense? How can we vote for them when our community is under threat from them?”

Jameela (right), who says she is 75 or 80 years old, tends to her family’s buffaloes. “We are dairy farmers but are scared to buy cows. We cannot even buy buffaloes from outside our own area,” she says. “Anyone can stop you on the way back.”

Voters don’t take electoral decisions on the basis of simple binaries, said Gilles Verniers. “Even if some Muslim women might have an improved opinion of the BJP, it does not erase everything else of the last couple of years.” Moreover, an attempt by the BJP to present instant triple talaq, a marginal social practice, as a widespread malaise that applies to Muslims as a whole could also create resentment, he said.

“All talk of gender justice for Muslim women is offset by mob lynching and hate crime,” said Mohd Arif, a journalist and social worker in the area. “Triple talaq will have no impact in Nuh.”

The Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA) office in Mumbai’s Bandra East keeps track of the number of instant triple talaq cases that come its way. The numbers plunged since 2017 onward when the Supreme Court declared the practice illegal.

Source: Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan, Mumbai

“Those who claim to speak for us, have no idea about the rights given to women by Islam,” said Zubaida Khatoon, a woman qazi (priest) trained by BMMA to officiate at marriages.

Zubaida Khatoon, a woman qazi, was trained by the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan to officiate at marriages. “Those who claim to speak for us, have no idea about the rights given to women by Islam,” says Khatoon.

“Triple talaq was not the only issue we were fighting,” said BMMA founder Noorjehan Safia Niaz. “In our application to the Supreme Court, we had asked for a ban on not just triple talaq, but also polygamy and halala (a practice under which a divorced wife who wishes to remarry her former husband must first consummate an intervening marriage). Unfortunately, the court only heard us on triple talaq and not the other two issues.”

Yet, conceded Niaz, the ban has had a chilling effect on those who sought instant talaq, and the numbers have plummeted in recent years. “At least the [Narendra] Modi government brought in a law that has brought the practice down. But men can still bring in a second wife and Muslim women live in constant fear of this.”

What is needed is a comprehensive law that covers all three–instant triple talaq, polygamy and halala, she said. But a uniform civil code (UCC), a promise of the BJP in its manifesto, is not a solution. “A UCC is applicable to the whole country. First you need to ask 80% of Hindus if they want it,” Niaz said.

The BMMA has been at the forefront for social and legal reform guaranteed to Muslim women under both their religion and the Constitution. What it wants is for parliament to pass a comprehensive Muslim family law on the lines of the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955. This, said Niaz, would enable Muslim women to live a life of empowerment and dignity.

“It’s a pity that in 72 years of Independence, no government has given any thought to needed reforms,” said Niaz. “It’s convenient for everyone to just leave this issue alone. But why should Muslim women continue to live in fear? Are we not entitled to constitutional rights?”

Last month, the BMMA released a charter of demands ahead of the 2019 election. It wants political parties to adhere to supporting constitutional nationalism rather than any divisive ideology in the name of nationalism. It wants action against hate speech and religious polarisation and a halt to “open hatred by many right-wing groups and individuals in the last four-five years”. And it wants a “healing touch” and reassurance to minorities and Dalits “about their being equal citizens in a secular democracy”.

Nowhere in the seven-point charter is there any mention of the term ‘triple talaq’.

‘Peace. That is all we need.’
In the narrow lanes of Delhi’s Jamia Nagar, a small group of women is talking about what it is like to live in fear. Ever since Junaid was stabbed to death on a Delhi-Mathura train in June 2017, Sareena Begum who has studied till the fifth standard and has four children–three boys and a girl–said she cannot sleep till her children return home safe.

“If you have a beard, wear a kurta-pyjama and look a certain way, then you are a target out on the street,” said Sareena. “My husband has asked me to avoid wearing a burqa when I leave this locality. He doesn’t want me to stand out.”

Zubaira (she uses one name), a Delhi University graduate in political science who works as an assistant with a private company in Rohini, talked about what she expected from this election. “Peace. That is all we need,” she said.

Ayesha (she uses one name), who lives in Ghaziabad in a village dominated by Jat neighbours, said even a few years ago, she never felt insecure. But now, even though nobody has actually said anything to her, she feels apprehensive when she leaves her house. “It’s the way people look at you. We could be the next target,” she said. Growing up, she said, her family kept a cow for milk. They had Hindu friends. “I’m not saying the Congress is great. But at least there was no hate then.”

Wives of electricians and embroiderers, like voters everywhere, the women have a lot on their mind–from notebandi, the colloquial term for demonetisation, to unemployment. In the past, they said, they voted for whichever candidate they felt would be good for the area. “Arvind Kejriwal did a lot of work for us and improved schools and set up dispensaries. He got many of the roads here repaired and even the electricity bill came down,” said Ayesha. “He left a good job to come into politics.”

Now there is a new anxiety, fuelled by a combination of social media, nationalism, incidents of violence and the projection of candidates by the BJP such as Pragya Thakur, charged in a terrorist conspiracy case under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.

“It’s not just one thing, it’s a combination of things,” said Dolly Siddiqui, a social worker active at Jamia Nagar. “Lynching incidents have not stopped and there is a continuing question on our desh bhakti (patriotism). Every day we are told to ‘go to Pakistan’.”

Social media has ripped the mask off civility maintained by neighbours. Zubaira talked of her husband’s childhood friend, a Hindu. The two grew up together, celebrating each other’s festivals. Now, the friend forwards hateful and often fake messages questioning the nationalism of Muslims. “My husband has not confronted him, but he has unfollowed him on Facebook,” she said.

For this group of women, it seems like a fight for survival. “Once you cross the metro line, you are away from this mohalla (area) and it is not safe for us over there,” said Sareena. “Our only aim is to defeat the BJP.”

(Namita Bhandare is a Delhi-based journalist who writes frequently on gender issues confronting India.)

Courtesy: India Spend.

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New Delhi: To understand how some political parties seem to have woken up to the need for greater women’s political representation ahead of the general elections scheduled for April and May 2019, you have only to look at the millennial female voter.

Anju Baa, a 20-year-old tribal girl from Rajgampur village in Sundergarh district in northwestern Odisha, has completed her graduation. She is enrolled in a computer class and says she will apply for a job once her course is over. Marriage? She shrugs, first comes the job.

When Anju was just a baby, her mother, Rani Secundra Baa, class 12 pass and employed as a domestic worker in Delhi, voted in her first–and so far only–election. The candidate for Birmitrapur, her assembly seat in the year 2000, was tribal leader George Tirkey, who recently joined the Congress party. Why did she vote for Tirkey? Because, said Rani, her village had taken a collective decision to support him.

But nobody tells Anju who to vote for. Like her friends, she is guided by her marzi (choice). Would she prefer a woman candidate? “I will see who the candidate is. But so far, women have done good work in my village. Our sarpanch [elected head of the village council] is a woman and she is accessible and hard-working. She got a lot of road works done for us. So, yes, women are more dedicated than men when it comes to serving the community,” she told IndiaSpend over the phone.  

Perhaps four-time Odisha chief minister Naveen Patnaik has been listening to girls like Anju, prompting him to announce that he is earmarking 33% of the state’s 21 parliamentary seats to women. Odisha will hold elections to parliament and the state assembly (legislature) simultaneously in April 2019.

Anju is representative of the new, assertive, millennial female voter who has been turning up in larger numbers than men to exercise the ballot.

This new voter is far more likely than her mother to have completed at least 10 years of school. She is more likely than her brother to be enrolled in school–as of 2016, the secondary school enrollment rate for girls was 75.8%, higher than boys’ 74.59%, as per World Bank data.

She is a part of India’s young, aspirational female generation with seven out of 10 girls planning to complete their graduation and three in four, like Anju, having decided on specific career paths, as a 2018 survey by Naandi Foundation found.

Like most young women of her generation, Anju believes that women should participate in politics, just like men. Among first-time women voters, 68% respondents said women should participate in politics at par with men, a survey conducted in February 2019 by the research organisation Lokniti-CSDS and the news portal The Quint found. Three out of five respondents said they would vote for a candidate and party of their choice, without being influenced by family.

More than a quarter-century of reservations for women in local governance bodies and panchayats, mandated by the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments of 1992, has created a cadre of politically aware women at the grassroots.

Women now comprise 46% of elected representatives at the various levels of panchayati raj institutions, according to the Ministry of Panchayati Raj.

“Nearly a million women have gone through the panchayat system as elected leaders and another two million have contested the elections and lost. They are very aware voters, aware of development and other issues of their villages,” said Bidyut Mohanty, who heads the Women’s Studies division at the Delhi-based think-tank, Institute of Social Sciences (ISS).

These women might not have broken through the glass ceiling, but they know what they want at the ballot and are unafraid of exercising choice.

“More and more women are coming out to vote not because of any top-down policy intervention but by the voluntary act of self-empowerment,” said Shamika Ravi, director of Brookings India, a think-tank.

The steady increase in female voter turnout is a ‘silent revolution’, said Ravi. In the 2014 general election, the gender gap between men and women was down to its narrowest ever–just 1.5 percentage points compared to a 15-percentage-point gap in the 1962 elections–and in 16 states and union territories, women’s voter turnout exceeded that of men.

Declining gender bias in voting can be seen across all the states, including the traditionally backward ‘BIMARU’–Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh–notes a March 2014 paper written by Mudit Kapoor and Shamika Ravi in the Economic and Political Weekly. This decline “[i]s solely driven by the dramatic increase in women participation in the elections since the 1990s, while men participation has remained unchanged (sic)”, the authors wrote.

While the overall sex ratio has marginally worsened from the 1960s to the 2000s, the voter sex ratio has improved. Fewer incidents of violence and improved infrastructure are some of the reasons why more women are turning up to vote, said Ravi. “The cost of voting has come down for women,” she said, adding that earlier, when there was large-scale ballot stuffing–a type of electoral fraud when a person permitted only one vote submits multiple–it was invariably the votes of women and the elderly that were captured.

The Election Commission of India has since the 1990s embarked on a drive to get more women to come out and vote. “The first thing I did was to look at the gender ratio of the country,” said former chief election commissioner S.Y. Quraishi. Despite a lopsided sex ratio, there were at least 20 million women missing from the electoral rolls. “We sent booth-level officers to go and find those missing women to get them enrolled as voters,” he told IndiaSpend.

Women are still missing from electoral rolls, but among the new voters announced earlier this month by the Election Commission, 43.5 million are women and 38 million are men, The Economic Times reported on March 12, 2019.
 

Source: Election Commission of India

Correcting a historical imbalance
The announcement by two political parties, Naveen Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal (BJD) in Odisha and Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, that they will be fielding a significant number of women for the general elections in 2019 could go some way in redressing a historic imbalance in gender representation–women comprise 48.1% of the population but hold only 12.1% of Lok Sabha seats.

In Odisha, where assembly and parliamentary elections will be held simultaneously, Patnaik has said he will earmark 33% (seven) of the BJD’s parliamentary election tickets for women.

The BJD’s first list of nine contestants includes three women. Two of them claim family lineage. Schoolteacher Kaushalya Hikaka will contest from Koraput, and is the wife of the incumbent member of parliament (MP) Jhina Hikaka. Sunita Biswal is the daughter of former Congress chief minister Hemnanda Biswal who joined the BJD earlier in March 2019 and will contest from Sundergarh.

Only Pramila Bishoyi, who will contest from Aksa, the constituency from where Naveen Patnaik began his own political career 20 years ago, is a grassroots leader in her own right as president of the Sata Sankha Self Help Group.

“The BJD has always been committed to women’s empowerment,” said BJD MP Pinaki Misra. As far back as 1991, before the 73rd Constitutional Amendment of 1992 mandated 33% reservation for women in local bodies and panchayats, party founder Biju Patnaik had introduced 33% reservation through a state law, said Misra. In 2012, his son Naveen had raised this to 50%.

“Women have traditionally been the BJD’s support base and they are an extremely important voter base. They don’t shift easily unlike men who might be susceptible to allurements. Women are far more stable in their thinking,” said Misra, adding, “Politics remains male dominated because the system is male dominated. Truly meritorious women are finding it tough to break the glass ceiling and Naveen Patnaik is committed to helping them do this.”

Currently, of the 21 MPs representing Odisha in Parliament, only three are women. In the 147-member state assembly, women are only 8% of all legislators (called ‘members of legislative assembly’, or MLAs), less than the national average of 9%.

In 2014, women candidates for Odisha’s assembly elections were even fewer than in the previous 2009 election. Yet, more women won in 2014 than in 2009.

Women have traditionally found it difficult to campaign in assembly and parliamentary elections, said Pratyusha Rajeshwari Singh, who won a by-election to her husband’s Kandhamal parliamentary seat following his death a few months after the 2014 polls. “Reservation in the panchayats has brought forward many women but their voices still are not heard since they are dominated by the male members of their family. But with education, they are getting exposure, and they want to serve the people,” she said.

The assertion of women’s agency in Odisha can be seen not only in terms of their eagerness to vote but also in the rise of self-help groups (SHG) in the state. There are at present 7 million women SHG members under the government’s Mission Shakti programme. In January 2019 at a Mission Shakti convention attended by some 50,000 women, Patnaik announced zero-interest loans of up to Rs 3 lakh to SHGs. And in November 2018, at the Make in Odisha summit, he had promised smartphones to 600,000 SHGs.

A day after Patnaik’s promise to earmark 33% of parliamentary tickets to women, Trinamool Congress (TMC) chief Mamata Banerjee released a list of her party’s candidates to parliament. Of these, 41% are women, which is unprecedented for any election ever in the history of Indian democracy.

“Mamata doesn’t always have a calculated game-plan. She can be very impulsive,” said a political watcher in the state who did not wish to be named. “Some are going to be difficult seats to win, but by giving so many tickets to women, Mamata has kept her image as a path-breaker who doesn’t follow established rules.”

Women’s voter turnout in the state exceeded men’s even in the 2011 assembly election when Mamata Banerjee’s TMC ended 34 years of uninterrupted Marxist rule. In the next assembly election, not only did women’s voter turnout remain higher than that of men but more women also contested the election as candidates. The results showed Mamata’s popularity had remained intact, with the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) reduced to number three in the state while the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) emerged as the principal opposition.

An analysis of the initial lists of contestants by the BJP and the Congress shows that it is business as usual for the larger parties. Of the BJP’s 184 candidates announced in the first list, only 23, or 12.5%, are women. In the Congress’s list, 17 of 143 candidates, or 11.9%, are women.
“The BJP has already earmarked 33% to women within the organisation,” said Shaina N.C., party spokesperson and treasurer of the Maharashtra BJP. “But that is not sufficient. Fighting elections is most important.”

What women voters want
Do women voters influence electoral outcomes? Absolutely, said Ravi of Brookings India. In a study of the Bihar assembly polls of February 2005 where no party had a majority, leading to a repoll eight months later, Ravi found the winning party changed in 87 of the 243 constituencies. But between February and October, the female voters’ percentage also increased from 42.5% to 44.5% while that of male voters declined from 50% to 47%.

“Women tend to vote for change while the men are more status quoist,” said Ravi. “Nitish Kumar [the current chief minister of Bihar] knows he was brought into power by the women vote, and political parties now are taking a leaf out of his book.”

What do women voters want? In Bihar, Kumar promised the state’s robust women’s SHGs that have more than 8.2 million members that he would bring in alcohol prohibition–a long-standing demand. Voted to office, he kept that promise.

In Odisha, the assiduous cultivation of women voters–prohibition, reservation in government jobs, vocational training, cycles, sanitary napkins, uniforms and scholarships for girls–has almost made women Patnaik’s “natural constituency”, said Pavan K Varma, national general secretary and spokesperson of the Janata Dal (United). “There has been institutionalisation of the way benefits of government policies flow to women,” he said.

Women voters often have the same demands as men, said Bidyut Mohanty. At the top of the list is employment and livelihood. But women also want health, education, access to drinking water, safety and security, and sanitation.

There is, however, no evidence to suggest that women vote as a block. Yet even a slight tilt or preference for a political party in the voting patterns of women can significantly alter results, said Sanjay Kumar, director of the Delhi-based research institute, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS). With the shrinking of the gender gap in voter turnout, female influence on elections is likely to grow, he said.
Women do not necessarily vote for women–unless it is a female head of a party. For instance, in the 2016 assembly elections in Tamil Nadu, the vote share of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) of Tamil Nadu, then headed by the late J. Jayalalithaa, among women was 10 percentage points higher than among men, wrote CSDS’s Kumar in an article for Mint. As a result, the party was able to reverse an anti-incumbency trend in the state. Similarly, in the West Bengal assembly election that same year, the vote share of the TMC increased significantly among women voters as compared to men, said Kumar.

Despite higher winnability, little room for women candidates
Whichever way you look at it, women’s representation in Indian politics has been abysmal. Historically, Indian women who have occupied positions of power–from Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the first woman president of the United Nations General Assembly, to Nirmala Sitharaman, India’s first stand-alone woman defence minister–have been exceptions and not norms.

The first Lok Sabha of 1952 had only 22 women MPs, or 4.5% of the House. Some 67 years later, women comprised 12.15%, the highest percentage ever, of the outgoing Lok Sabha with just 66 women MPs.

Representation in the state assemblies is worse, with a national average of 9%. In the 53 years since Nagaland was created as a state, it has never elected a woman MLA, while just one woman from the state, the late Rano Mese Shaiza, ever made it to parliament.

Haryana has the highest proportion of women MLAs at 15% of the total assembly strength. In Kerala, women’s representation peaked at 9.3% in the 2001 election but has steadfastly remained below 6% since.

‘Winnability’ or success rate is the reason most often cited by political parties to explain their parsimony in fielding women at the elections. Even the BJD has reserved seats only for the parliamentary polls, despite the fact that assembly elections are being held simultaneously in Odisha.

Yet, data show that women contestants have consistently had a higher winning percentage than men.

The collective failure of political parties to field a critical mass of female candidates is worrisome because it highlights the absence of a pipeline of women leaders, said Shamika Ravi in a 2014 paper, Women in Party Politics. Co-authored with Rohan Sandhu, a research assistant at Brookings India, the paper notes, “Our political apparatus has collectively failed to nurture women leaders, leaving it unprepared should quotas in Parliament be legislated. In such a context, even if the Bill were to pass, its impact would be dubious.”
On paper, party constitutions talk about mandating positions for women within the organisation. Reality, however, is quite different.
In 2014, only five of the Congress party’s executive body of 42 members were women, found Ravi and Sandhu. The situation was just as discouraging in other parties. None of the 30 vice-presidents of the TMC were women. At the Aam Aadmi Party, only two members of the 24-member national executive were women. At the CPM, only one member of the 12-member polit-bureau was a woman.

Only the BJP was somewhat better with 26 women among the 77 members of the party’s national executive.

“The absence of women in party leadership positions is indicative of an internal party infrastructure that is unsupportive of women’s political participation,” said Ravi.

And yet, it is political parties who are gatekeepers in women’s political participation. Party leaderships decide how many and which women they will field as contestants.

Despite the silence from the BJD on how many women it will field for the assembly elections, the announcements by the party and that of the TMC to earmark parliamentary seats for women is welcome, said Ravi, because it will “lead to the creation of a pipeline of women leaders”.

There is no sign so far that other parties are likely to be inspired. Regardless, said Mohanty, the greater visibility of women on the 2019 campaign trail is the first step in achieving greater gender equity in India’s political life.

“Indian values don’t change overnight and it can take generations to see change,” said Mohanty. “We have a long way to go.”

(Namita Bhandare is a Delhi-based journalist who writes frequently on gender issues confronting India.)

We welcome feedback. Please write to respond@indiaspend.org. We reserve the right to edit responses for language and grammar.

Courtesy: India Spend

The post Record Women Voters’ Turnout But Few Women Contestants appeared first on SabrangIndia.

 
The idea of this 45-minute exercise, said Blesson Joseph of team-building company Dfrens, is to demonstrate the power of cooperation. “If you come together, you can make a difference,” he said.

 
GurgaonMoms, the organiser of this day-long event of talks, competitions, pitches and, yes, drumming, aims to do precisely that: Get women to form a network where they help each other.
 
Launched in 2011 by Neela Kaushik, an MBA with a background in digital marketing, as an online support group for mums with queries–what’s a good school, recommend a reasonably-priced dentist, yoga instructor, and even heated discussions on politics–GurgaonMoms now claims 25,000 members, all of them mothers, most of them professionally qualified and some of them in search of opportunities that will put their qualifications to use.
 
There’s Pooja Sardana, an MBA from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, mother of two children–a girl aged seven and a boy aged four–who put in 14 years in various companies including Unilever and GSK before she quit after the birth of her son in 2014 to “explore a different side of myself”.
 
“I needed the time to figure out what I want to do,” she said. For a while she shared stories on her travel blog and by the end of this year, she plans to launch a brand of children’s shoes.
 
Shagun Singh stayed with her sales job at a five-star hotel in Mumbai even two years after the birth of her son in August 2006. Then her husband got a job in Delhi and, so, she took a transfer. But the Delhi office expected her to clock in twice a day before and after going out on calls. “The work culture did not allow for flexibility and I started exploring options to make better use of my time as a mom and a professional,” she said.

 
Singh’s father ran a business that provided security and housekeeping services. “I realised there is a demand for professional housekeeping services,” she said, “So I launched my own firm, HomeWork.” The job gives her flexi-hours and, more crucially, she’s home by 2.30 pm, which is when her son, now 11, gets home from school. “It’s important for me to be around when he gets back,” she said.
 
Smiti Puri completed her MBA from City University New York and landed a job with a bank in New York. When she got married to a Delhi-based businessman, she moved back to India and took a transfer from the bank. But, she said, the work culture here was “totally unprofessional”. For a while she worked for an internet incubator. Then she got pregnant.
 
“That’s when I decided to help my husband’s family business of textiles, shawls and carpets get online,” she said. But when her second child was born, said Puri, it was like being “hit by a train”.
 
“Nothing I have done, not 20-hour days nor impossible deadlines, has been as physically and emotionally challenging as bringing up my children,” she said. As of now, Puri is happy to be a stay-at-home mom, watching over her two boys aged four and one. She has no plans to get back to a job.
 
Corporate’s India’s motherhood bump
 
The motherhood bump is showing in corporate India. “While there are few entry points for women, the exit gates are many – pregnancy, child care, elderly care, lack of family support, and unsupportive work environment,” said an April 2018 study, Predicament of Returning Mothers, conducted jointly by Ashoka University and the Genpact Centre for Women’s Leadership.
 
“Having a young child in the home depresses mothers’ employment, an inverse relationship that has intensified over time,” found a March 2017 World Bank policy paper, The Motherhood Penalty and Female Employment in Urban India, written by Maitreyi Bordia Das and Ieva Zumbyte.
 
India’s low female workforce participation rate, at 24%, according to the 2018 Economic Survey, is amongst the worst in South Asia. Between 2004 and 2011, the year of the last census, nearly 20 million women fell off the labour map, and there are no signs that this slide has stopped.
 
This dwindling participation by women in employment is perplexing because it comes at a time of increased educational attainment, declining fertility and economic growth. Paradoxically, as our September 2017 story showed, it is India’s most educated women who are leaving jobs faster than others.
 
Our nation-wide investigation (links to other parts in this series at the end of this story) found that women are falling off the labour map for various reasons, including the need to get their family’s permission to work, social attitudes about what is appropriate work for women, bearing a disproportionate burden of unpaid care work, safety issues and the lack of infrastructure such as affordable and reliable public transport.
 
And motherhood.
 
A silent but stark effect on mums
 
In most cultures around the world, mothers are the primary caregivers of their children. But in India, motherhood has been elevated to an exalted status.
 
“Socially, mothers are expected to put their children’s needs above all others, and certainly above their own,” said Das, author of the 2017 World Bank paper we referred to earlier. A woman who prioritises her career ahead of, or even alongside, young children being brought up by domestic workers or in daycare “often receives implicit or explicit censure both within and outside the house”, she said.
 
When women get pregnant, the barriers they already face at the workplace just making a name for themselves are amplified, said Sairee Chahal, founder and CEO of Sheroes, which describes itself as the world’s largest online career destination for women with two million members.
 
“For mothers, managing the logistics–daycare, reliable household help, a support system–can become problematic,” Chahal said. The incentive to remain employed thus decreases dramatically as a result. “There is a silent but stark effect on mums.”

 
 
As joint families break down, the burden of child rearing goes up. “Motherhood places a penalty on almost all female workers–unless formal or informal institutions, as well as fathers and husbands, step in to share care responsibilities with women and female wages are high enough to compensate for the monetary and non-monetary costs of childcare,” said Das.
 
“Our own studies have found that having young children constrain women’s employment whereas having an older female relative, say, a mother-in-law, increases her chances of employment,” she said.
 
Globally, mothers of children below the age of five have, at 47.6%, the lowest employment rate compared with 87.9% for fathers and 54.4% for women who had no children, found a June 2018 study of 90 countries by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work. 
 

Source: International Labour Organisation, Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work, June 2018.)
 
The report confirms that motherhood definitely and demonstrably impacts women’s employment prospects. But is it alone in keep women away from employment?Source: International Labour Organisation, Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work, June 2018.)
 
Defining women’s work
 
All over the world, it is women who bear a disproportionate burden of not just child care but also other work around the house–cooking, cleaning, looking after the elderly and disabled, fetching firewood, fodder and water.  
 
In no country do men and women equally share unpaid care work. It is women who end up doing over three-quarters of the total global amount of unpaid care work.   
 
This work, needless to say, is unpaid.
 
Of course, it comes at a cost. Gender inequality in household work is reflected in the labour market. Put simply, the more you work (unpaid) in the house, the less time you have to work (paid) in the market.
 
In 2018, found the ILO report authored by Laura Addati and others, 606 million women of working age all over the world declared themselves to be unavailable for employment due to unpaid care work, while only 41 million men were inactive for the same reason.
 
It is unpaid care work that constitutes the “main barrier to women’s participation in labour markets”, noted the report.
 

Source: International Labour Organisation, Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work, June 2018.
Note: ‘Personal’ means education, sickness or disability. ‘Reasons related to labour market’ includes awaiting recall to work, believing no work available and lacking required qualifications. All numbers in percentage.
 
“A high road to care work implies achieving gender equality in labour markets and in households, therefore addressing the motherhood penalty,” said Laura Addati, lead author of the report and maternity protection and work-family specialist, ILO, Geneva. “Since care is a common good, the report calls for the overall and primary responsibility of the State in adopting transformative care policies in five main policy areas: care, macroeconomic, social protection, labour and migration policies,” she said in an email response.  
 
Farzana Afridi, an associate professor with the Indian Statistical Institute, agreed: It is marriage, rather than motherhood, that is the first stumbling block in women’s workforce participation.  
 
In 2011, for instance, half of all unmarried women in the 15-60 age bracket were in the labour force while the comparative rate for married women was 20%–a figure that has remained more or less stagnant for three decades, she said.
 
 
“For most women, there is a very narrow window to join the labour force between the time they complete their education and the time they get married,” she said. With motherhood, the chances of remaining in paid employment do go down–but not as much as they do with marriage, said Afridi.
 
Time-use data also show that whether a woman has one child or three, the time she spends on unpaid care work remains the same, said Afridi. The issue is not so much having children, the issue is unpaid care work. “You cannot address women’s workforce participation without first addressing the amount of unpaid care work they are required to do,” said Afridi. “Motherhood is a penalty but it is not the only one.”
 
Bearing the cost
 
Mandating paid maternity leave is one obvious intervention that governments can make, even though in India it impacts only the roughly 5% of women who work in the organised sector.
 
Yet, found a recent study by human resources services company TeamLease, in the short-term, enhanced maternity leave could lead to as many as 12 million women potentially losing jobs across all sectors in 2018 as a result of the Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act of March 2017 that increased maternity leave from 12 to 26 weeks.
 
The job loss would typically take place in small and medium-sized enterprises and is “likely to vary from reduced demand for women to unethical behavior of reducing the upfront salary for women”, said the report.
 
However, “large, professionally managed companies–both private and public sector–and medium-sized public sector companies will actively back the amendment and are more likely to hire more women”, it said.
 
Among some companies, there is a recognition that they will have to lean out if they want to retain female talent and pursue employee diversity as a goal.
 
Diversity is not a warm, fuzzy idea for corporates but makes sound business sense with a more heterogeneous group likely to throw up better innovation, said Roopa Wilson, who manages diversity and inclusion at IBM India.
 
Quoting IBM chairman, president and CEO, Virginia M. Rometty, Wilson said: “IBM thinks about diversity the way we think about innovation–both are essential to the success of our business…. When we incorporate diversity into our business, we create better innovations and outcomes.”
 
IBM has several programmes designed specifically for returning mothers–from providing an additional six-months’ unpaid leave post the mandatory six-month maternity leave to providing online learning courses and trainings so that employees, particularly women on long leave, don’t become redundant, said Wilson. 
 
In addition, she said, the company provides for childcare centres in almost all locations across India and even has an elder care programme designed for the parents and parents-in-law of employees (picking up medical reports, sending a nurse for shots etc).
 
Despite these steps, said Wilson, last year the company realised it had not fully factored in women themselves and their desires.
 
“The girl child in India has a strong education identity; we tell them ‘study hard, become a doctor’,” said Wilson. “They even have a sense of job identity and know that once they graduate they will get jobs. But we still have to develop a sense of career identity in our girls.”
 
Up to 51% of all entry-level jobs are filled by women, and these women only start hitting roadblocks after the first three to four years of their jobs, found a 2011 Nasscom survey. That’s when they might get married and have to relocate to where their husbands live and work. When they have children, there is a “social and cultural issue where priorities change”, and this is the challenge that workplaces have to address, said Wilson.
 
But, warned Sairee Chahal, workplaces are becoming leaner and there has, in the past few years, been a lot of “change and churn”. “Our economy is not creating enough jobs. We are creating 1.5 million corporate jobs a year, whereas we need a million jobs every month,” she said. In this straitened situation, “one person out is one person less” and women who choose to opt out of jobs are not going to be anyone’s priority.  
 
Leaning in, leaning out
 
Reams have been written ever since Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg advised professional women to “lean in” and stick it out.    
 
It’s important to stay the course, agreed Paroma Roy Chowdury, vice president, public affairs, Softbank, and mother to a 26-year-old son. “It can get really tough and the greatest attribute a woman at work can have is a thick skin,” she said.  
 
Chowdhury made the switch from journalism to corporate communications, taking three months off when she had her son, and then diving right back to work. What moms want at work, she said, is a certain degree of empathy, when a kid falls ill, for instance. Having more role models and women in mentorship roles would also help. And, of course, she added, there is no over-estimating the value of good support structures at home and at work.  
 
But dads are changing too, and it’s important to recognise this, said Aparna Samuel Balasundaram, an author and psychotherapist who has conducted corporate training sessions with companies such as Wipro and Accenture. Balasundaram said she recently held a parenting workshop that was attended by three times as many men as there were women.
 
“There’s a realisation that if you’re going to remain a two-income family to enable a certain lifestyle, then men are going to have to support their wives,” she said. “Moreover, today’s men just want to be better fathers.”
 
But ultimately there is no getting around the cultural mindset change needed to get more mothers back into the workplace.
 
“Everything goes back to the way we are raising our daughters,” said Deepa Narayan, a former advisor to the World Bank and author of Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women. “We want our daughters to become doctors but her ultimate goal is marriage to be able to ‘adjust’ after marriage. So her inner conditioning is to pull back and be respectful, silent and obedient.”
 
But, “for many women the challenge is not external but internal. They are hitting up against their own guilt all the time. It comes from your own judgment, the judgment of your family, and that of your peers,” said Kachina Chawla, a public health specialist whose portal, GharKamai, connecting women professionals with project-based work recently got acquired by Sheroes.
 
“We were brought up to believe that we could change the world, so does staying at home mean we are letting down the side?”
 
This is the twelfth part in an ongoing nation-wide IndiaSpend investigation into India’s declining female labour force participation.
 
Read other stories in this series:
 
Part 1: Why Indian workplaces are losing women
Part 2: In a Haryana factory, tradition clashes with aspiration
Part 3: Housework keeps India’s women at home (but some are changing that)
Part 4: India’s hospitality sector must first win over the parents of the skilled women it needs
Part 5: Why India’s most educated women are leaving jobs faster than others
Part 6: Why Himachali women work: the answer in a jam factory
Part 7: Judge to Worker: The spread of sexual harassment in India
Part 8: Bihar’s poorest women are changing their lives, with a little help
Part 9: On Delhi’s ragged edges, women bear highest cost of scant transport
Part 10: How scooters are helping Haryana’s women get to work
Part 11: As Indian women leave jobs, single women keep working. Here’s why
 
(Namita Bhandare is a Delhi-based journalist who writes frequently on the gender issues confronting India.)
 

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At the Haryana police academy in Madhuban, most women trainee constables depend on their husbands to take them everywhere, even to work. Head Constable Pinky, part of an effort to change that, says, “I want these girls to learn to drive so that they never have to depend on any man to take them anywhere.”
 
 The women, the daughters of teachers, labourers and farmers, know this: They will not be promoted to the next rank unless they learn to drive two-wheelers.
 
“It’s a bit scary when you start driving,” said Sarita, who joined the Haryana police as a constable in November 2016. “But then you get a hang of it, and your life becomes so much easier.” Like many of the women here, Sarita uses only one name.
 
 

 Why do these women need to learn to ride two-wheelers? 
 
“In our line of work, mobility is very important as you have to be able to respond quickly when there is a crime,” said Mamta Singh, inspector general of police (crimes against women) and the highest-ranking woman police officer in Haryana.
 
In the past, women constables have either waited for a government vehicle to be made available to them–or requested husbands to take them to the scene of a crime when duty calls, said head constable Pinky, the no-nonsense driving instructor here at the academy.
 
This is only the second batch she’s teaching. “These women are constantly waiting for some man to take them to places and even drop them off to duty,” she said. “I tell these girls, ‘what if your gharwala doesn’t have the time’? I want these girls to learn to drive so that they never have to depend on any man to take them anywhere.”

 
 
Haryana’s women have progressed, but it isn’t enough
 
Haryana, the state from where Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched his flagship Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao campaign for having the country’s worst sex ratio, has a mahila thana (all-women police station) in all its 21 districts. Women account for more than 9% of the total police force in the state, said Mamta Singh, above the national average of 7.28%, according to Bureau of Police Research and Development data.  
 
On some gender indices, the state does well. For instance, maternal mortality, which is the number of deaths per 100,000 live births, for 2011-13 was 127, compared to the national average of 167, according to Niti Aayog.
 
More girls are in school than before, and one in three of Haryana’s girls has completed secondary school, above the national average of one in four.
 
Yet, despite educational gains, Haryana continues to have amongst the lowest female labour force participation rates in India. Only 19% of Haryana’s women are in paid employment, compared to  the already low national average of 31%, according to this World Bank June 2017 report. The latest Economic Survey pegs the all-India female workforce rate at just 24%.
 

Source: World Bank, Haryana Gender Brief, June 2017 
 
It’s not just Haryana. Women are dropping off the labour map all over India. In just 10 years until 2011 (the year of the last Census), 19.6 million women had quit jobs.
 
The slide continues.
 
Women continue to drop out of paid employment for a variety of complex reasons, as our ongoing nation-wide investigation shows.
 
Female agency on some significant parameters has improved, according to the latest Economic Survey. For instance, across India, women are far more involved in decisions about their own health, are marrying later and having their first child later in 2015 than they were a decade ago. But in terms of economic engagement, women continue to drop out of paid work.  
 

Source: Economic Survey 2017-18
 
One of the reasons is the lack of reliable, safe and cheap public transportation, as this study, by the Institute of Transportation and Development and the NGO, Jagori, shows. (See earlier IndiaSpend stories on the link between transportation, mobility and women’s economic participation here and here.)
 
When they do seek jobs, women would rather opt for those that are closer home, even if these jobs pay less than those further away.
 
Why learning to drive is important to women
 
In 2016, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) was involved in a skilling programme designed for women to get jobs in the textile industry.
 
After they had been trained, 60 women from various Haryana villages received job offers from factories in Panipat, said Kanta Singh, UNDP’s state project head for Haryana and the National Capital Region. But the women asked, ‘how will we get to work’?
 
So, the state government agreed to start a bus service. But even this was not good enough. The women found that half their salaries went into bus fare. Moreover, the commute each way took over an hour. By the end of the first month, 59 of the 60 had quit, said Singh.
 
It was an important learning experience for UNDP, which runs various skilling programmes for women nationwide. “If we want women to find jobs, then we have to make sure they are mobile,” said Clement Chauvet, chief of skills and business development, UNDP.
 
There are two key factors that determine a woman’s decision to seek a job–safety and mobility. “She asks: ‘How will I get to work?’ And ‘can I come and go safely,’” said Chauvet.
 
Thus, it isn’t enough to just teach women technical skills, said experts. It is imperative also to equip them with other skills that will enable their economic participation. Learning to ride a two-wheeler, for instance.
 
In cities like Aurangabad in Maharashtra, the sight of women whizzing around town, long gloves covering their arms to prevent from getting tanned, is commonplace. But in Haryana, there is a perception that driving is only for men, said inspector general Mamta Singh. Yet, “when a woman rides a scooter she is not only empowered but she also becomes a visible symbol of that empowerment”, she said.
 
Women’s increased physical mobility results “in economic mobility and improved access of economic opportunities thereby enhancing sources of livelihood”, said Ritu Dewan, economist and director, Centre for Development Research and Action, a think tank.
 
Driving force: From Haryana to five other states
 
The guard at the gate of the Bhagat Phool Singh Mahila Vishwavidyalaya (BPS) at Khanpur Kalan in Sonepat district, 100 km north-west of Delhi, wanted to know my husband’s name to be entered into an official register that marks the entry and exit of visitors to this “only women, rural, multi-faculty residential university in the country providing education from K.G. to PhD”.
 
A brief argument ensued and the husband’s name was eventually left out. Inside, the campus includes a school of engineering and sciences, an institute of teacher training and research, and a polytechnic. The university, including the Kanya Gurukul Senior Secondary School that it runs, has 7,000 students, all girls and women, mostly from neighbouring villages.
 
The university was established in 2006 and in September 2016, along with UNDP, set up a career counselling and guidance centre. “Our students come from nearby villages,” said Suman Dalal, the nodal officer for UNDP at the university. “They want jobs but there aren’t a lot of opportunities near where they live.”
 
The girls themselves, but more often their parents, are simply not prepared to relocate so far just for jobs, said Dalal. Their chief concern: How are we going to commute so far from home?
 
“If we want to help women get jobs and placements, we have to teach them to drive at least a two-wheeler, which they can perhaps afford to buy at some stage,” said Kanta Singh.
 
And so, it was with this knowledge that the Disha project, a partnership between UNDP and India Development Foundation, supported by the IKEA Foundation, entered into a collaboration with Hero MotoCorp, the two-wheeler manufacturer, the Haryana government and the university.
 
Starting in June 2017, the university’s scooter-driving school has been such a success, said Vijay Sethi, who heads Hero’s CSR (corporate social responsibility) initiative, adding that the company has started similar initiatives in five other states including Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. Hero is also a collaborator at the police academy at Madhuban.
 
Gradually, men have stopped staring
 
At BPS, some 260 women, students as well as university employees, have already learned to ride. Amongst the first to enroll was not a student but the woman sarpanch of nearby Kasanda village.
 
 
“I joined the first batch because I don’t want to have to depend on my husband to take me around to do my job,” said the sarpanch, Nisha Dayya Malik. “Everybody in my village saw that I was taking scooter classes and suddenly all the other girls said they wanted to learn too.”
 
Many learners at the two-wheeler riding training academy are university employees. Rachna, a clerk, said she used to walk to work, 30 minutes each way, from her home.
 
Now, she’s learned to drive, got herself a license and has bought her first two-wheeler–second-hand of course–from her savings. “There is so much work for me to do at home, so if I can save time commuting, it is a huge help to me,” she said.
 
Suman Dalal, a former state-level hockey player, remembers when she first started driving a car to work back in 2003. “Men would stop their cars and stick their heads out of the window to see the strange sight of a woman driver,” she said.
 
 And now? She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s not a big deal.”
 
This is the tenth part in an ongoing nation-wide IndiaSpend investigation into India’s declining female labour force participation.
 
Read other stories in this series:
 
Part 1: Why Indian workplaces are losing women
Part 2: In a Haryana factory, tradition clashes with aspiration
Part 3: Housework keeps India’s women at home (but some are changing that)
Part 4: India’s hospitality sector must first win over the parents of the skilled women it needs
Part 5: Why India’s most educated women are leaving jobs faster than others
Part 6: Why Himachali women work: the answer in a jam factory
Part 7: Judge to Worker: The spread of sexual harassment in India
Part 8: Bihar’s poorest women are changing their lives, with a little help
Part 9: On Delhi’s ragged edges, women bear highest cost of scant transport
 
(Namita Bhandare is a Delhi-based journalist who writes frequently on the gender issues confronting India.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

The post How Scooters Are Helping Haryana’s Women Get To Work appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The all-women team at the Bhuira Jam Factory in Sirmaur district, Himachal Pradesh. Having a job has meant empowerment in tangible ways. Everyone, even the temporary employees, has a bank account and post office savings schemes.

The all-women jam-making team at Bhuira had a new task: Emptying out the office so that it could be painted. Perhaps out of habit, the women had their caps neatly on, their hair firmly tucked in, a smidgen of sindhoor (vermilion) peeping out from beneath.
 
Seated before a computer, Upasana Kumari is not a jam-maker at all and described herself as an administrator. With a BSc in information technology, the farmer’s daughter said all seven of her sisters (plus a brother) are educated or are still studying. The youngest wants to be a doctor and is in her final year of school; the eldest is married and helps her husband with his fruit orchard. “Only I have a paid job,” pointed out Kumari.
 
Married to a policeman who has a secure job and a steady salary, Kumari said she thought about getting back to work now that her only child, a boy, is three. What started with part-time work is now a full-fledged job, and she’s grateful for the factory since there aren’t many job opportunities for someone with her qualifications in this remote area. “If it wasn’t for this factory, I wouldn’t have been able to work at all,” she said. “I didn’t study so much so that I could sit at home.”
 

“I didn’t study so much so that I could sit at home,” said Upasana Kumari, a BSc in information technology, who is now an administrator at Bhuira Jams.
 
In contrast to its neighbours–particularly Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana–Himachal Pradesh stands out as a positive outlier in terms of social development.
 
Higher sex-ratio at birth, more literate and educated women
 
The 2011 Indian Human Development Report ranked Himachal Pradesh third after Kerala and Delhi. Dramatic poverty decline in rural areas–where 90% of the population lives–from 36.8% to 8.5% between 1993-94 and 2011; land reform with 80% of the population owning some amount of land; exceptional infrastructure; enlightened policy and legislation (the Himalayan state was the first to ban plastic bags) and an engaged citizenry are some of the features that make this such a stand-out state, according to a 2015 World Bank Group study, Scaling the Heights: Social Inclusion and Sustainable Development in Himachal Pradesh.
 
Source: India and Himachal Pradesh factsheets, National Family Health Survey, 2015-16
 
But impressive as these features are, the one feature that is perhaps not commented upon enough is the enthusiastic participation of the state’s women in jobs, particularly in rural areas.
 
For some years now, economists and policy-makers have been troubled by the dwindling number of women in paid jobs, or female labor force participation (FLFP).
 
The data are indisputable. Between the years 2004-05 and 2011-12, 19.6 million women dropped out of the Indian labour force, according to a 2017 World Bank report, Precarious Drop: Reassessing Patterns of Female Labour Force Participation in India.
 
During 1993-94 to 2011-12, participation fell from 42.6% to 31.2%. But the sharpest drop occurred between 2004-05 and 2011-12 in rural India amongst young girls and women aged between 15 and 24.
 
The exception to this trend: Himachal Pradesh.
 

Female Workforce Participation:
Himachal Pradesh & Its Neighbours

Source: Census 2011, Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation
 
Amongst all states, Himachal Pradesh has, at 47.4%, the second-largest participation of women in the labour force in rural areas, after Sikkim, according to Census 2011. More recent findings by the World Bank in June 2017 place the state at number one, at par with Sikkim.
 
More women in rural Himachal Pradesh are at work
 
In keeping with the trends elsewhere the country, FLFP is waning in Himachal Pradesh too. Rural participation dipped four percentage points from 71% to 67% between 2004-05 and 2011-12, while urban participation also fell from 36% to 30%, according to this 2015 World Bank Group report.
 
Much of the state’s female workforce participation is driven by agriculture, still the mainstay of the state’s largely rural economy. In urban areas, the picture isn’t quite so rosy with an FLFP (according to Census data) of 19.9%–not great when you compare it with the rural figure, but still higher than the all India urban FLFP at 15.4%.
 
Source: Census 2011 Data, Office of the Registrar General, India, Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation
 
“Women in rural areas are more than twice as likely as their male counterparts to report themselves as being self-employed in agriculture,” said Maitreyi Bordia Das, lead author of the World Bank Group’s 2015 study.
 
Women in the hill states have always worked, said Pronab Sen, country director of International Growth Centre’s India central division. “There is a long history of men migrating for jobs and women taking over the economic activity in villages. They take the decisions and call the shots. This is culturally embedded in these states,” he said.
 
Women’s participation in agriculture in the state is probably very different from that in other north Indian states, said Das. Horticulture and floriculture, for instance, have higher value than traditional crops.
 
But, she warned, women elsewhere in India are withdrawing from agriculture. If Himachal is to avoid this trend, then “it’s important to make sure new opportunities in agri business benefit women as well”, she said.
 
Moreover, pointed out Das, agriculture is arduous manual work. “Himachali women report themselves as being employed in agriculture. This is good in a sense. It means they don’t regard themselves as mere helpers but active agents. But to keep them in jobs, it’s important to make jobs worth their while. And so, employment in high-value agriculture is really important.”
 
“I make the rotis, he makes the vegetables.” Neelam Devi, grade X pass
 
‘Made by happy mountain women,’ states every jar that bears the Bhuira label. Last year, these happy women made 65,458 kg of jams, jellies and chutneys sold in 108,000 large and 54,955 small bottles made in two factory units, one at Bhuira and a newer one that was set up in 2011 at Halonipul village nearby.
 
That’s a lot of jam for what started as a personal, for friends-and-family only venture by Linnet Mushran, an Englishwoman who made India her home.
 
The charming stone-and-slate cottage in Bhuira, Rajgarh tehsil in Sirmaur district, nestled deep inside pine forests in Himachal Pradesh remains Mushran’s home and is also the site of the factory that has eight full-time employees, all women, and, in season, between 18 and 19 jam-makers and between 12 and 15 packers (again, all women). Mushran’s daughter-in-law, Rebecca Vaz, is helping expand the business.
 
On the morning that I visited, I ran into Poonam Kanwar, 50, orchard owner who had walked to the factory to inquire if there is a requirement for the apricot and peaches that have ripened on her trees in Chichdiya village close by.
 
The factory had met this year’s orders. Kanwar shrugged–there would be other sales, figured the woman who has been supplying fruit to the jam factory for 10 years. Selling fruit to be made into jam anyway is an added source of income–her best pickings are sold in mandis and then sent to fruit markets in Delhi.
 
There’s really no time for chit-chat. Kanwar tends to 150 fruits trees, including lemons and pears in addition to peaches and apricots. She also grows vegetables for her own consumption. And there are four cows to look after.
 
The hard work of tending to the land and all that thrives on it is shared by Kanwar and her husband, ‘fifty-fifty’, she said.
 
A son has completed his masters in technology and has a job, and her 28-year-old daughter, as yet unmarried, is a ‘PhD in computers’, she said proudly. “I have worked on the land from the day I got married,” said Kanwar. “But nowadays girls are educated and when that happens there is no question that they will do farming.” Kanwar’s daughter has a job, teaching in Chandigarh where she lives alone.
 
The idea of shared household work doesn’t seem to be a novelty for many of the women. Neelam Devi, a grade X pass, has worked on and off at the factory–breaks in employment marked by the birth of her three children.
 
“Before marriage also I used to work. But then it was for shauk (fun). Now I earn so that I can educate my children, send them to the best schools, let them study to their heart’s content,” said Neelam Devi. It’s a vision she shares with her husband. “If he didn’t help me at home, how could I have worked outside? I make the rotis, he makes the vegetables,” she said.
 
Women in Himachal Pradesh have a long and perhaps unique history of community activism, pointed out Das’s World Bank report. “This form of assertion in public spaces resonates with their agency in the private sphere,” it stated.
 
As many as 96.4% of married urban women and 90% of married rural women in Himachal Pradesh–well above the all-India average of 85.8% and 83%, respectively–reported participating in household decisions, according to the National Family Health Survey, 2015-16.
 
Kamla Devi is the 58-year-old pradhan (head of the village council) of Bhuira village (population 685). She is, unusual for India, the only child and therefore the sole inheritor of her father’s land. “I grew up here. I am a daughter of this village,” she said.
 
The widow of a soldier, Devi has lived all over India including Kerala and Sikkim. “On the times that I went with him, I hired casual labour to look after the fields and fruit trees,” she said. Of her two sons, the elder died of cancer and the younger has a small tent business. Now, she tends to the fields alone, and looks after village council work. There’s a government school up to the grade X and two anganwadis (courtyard shelters). “Every girl here is in school,” she said.
 

Where The Women Work
Source: National Sample Survey Office, 68^th Round, Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation
 
I am introduced to Devi by her elder daughter-in-law, Ranjita, who has worked with Bhuira Jams from the day it received its commercial license in 1999. Back then, she was a young woman. Now, with her husband dead and nobody to help her mother-in-law with the land, was it ever suggested to her that she might perhaps chip in? “No. Never. I have always worked. The question of giving up my job never arose,” she said.
 

Ranjita Devi has worked with Bhuira Jams from the day it received its commercial license in 1999.
 
Bhuira’s grand supervisor is the four-feet-something Ram Kali, a woman with an easy laugh who says her age is between ‘50 and 65’ depending on her mood.
 
Kali’s parents came to Himachal Pradesh as migrant labour. She has no idea when they went back, or why she was left behind with a Himachali family. But this state has been her home ever since. She first came to Bhuira with her husband, a daily wage laborer who died some years ago, as a tenant farmer. “It was a forest. We leveled the land, planted apple trees and potatoes and lived on it for free,” she said.
 
For a woman who has never been to school, Kali manages the day-to-day operations at the jam factory–how much fruit is needed, is there enough stock and does lunch have to be cooked for the occasional visitor–with aplomb. “She’s my boss,” laughed Vaz.
 

Ram Kali’s parents came to Himachal Pradesh as migrant labour. Kali manages the day-to-day operations at Bhuira Jams–how much fruit is needed, is there enough stock and does lunch have to be cooked for the occasional visitor.
 
“This factory has changed so many lives,” she said. Having a job has meant empowerment in tangible ways. Everyone, even the temporary employees, has a bank account and post office savings schemes. Even those who don’t work here, like fruit-supplier Poonam Kanwar, have an additional income for the fruit that doesn’t make it to markets in Delhi and would otherwise rot on the trees.
 
“In Himachal, nobody ever went hungry,” said Kali. “But nobody ever had cash. Now, every woman here has money in her pocket.”
 
This is the sixth in a nation-wide IndiaSpend investigation into why Indian women are dropping out of the workplace.
 
Part 1: Why Indian workplaces are losing women
Part 2: In a Haryana factory, tradition clashes with aspiration
Part 3: Housework keeps Indian women at home. But some women are changing that
Part 4: Why India’s hospitality sector must win over parents of the skilled women it needs
Part 5: Why India’s most educated women are leaving jobs faster than others
 
(Namita Bhandare is a Delhi-based journalist who writes frequently on gender issues confronting India.)
 

The post Why Himachali Women Work: A Jam Factory May Have Answers appeared first on SabrangIndia.

 
Her village was a couple of kilometres away from the bus stop at Saanpla in Haryana’s Jhajjar district. In the summer when the days were long, it seemed safe enough to walk back home from the bus stop alone. But by November it was already dark by the time she got off the bus and walking back home alone no longer seemed like such a great idea.
 
So despite the fact that she had undergone four months of training at the Jindal steel factory, despite the fact that she had accepted the job offer, despite the fact that she was amongst the first batch of women to ever work on the factory floor, Usha (who uses only one name) put in her papers, defeated by the weather or, perhaps more accurately, her state’s crime statistics.
 
It’s not just Haryana. All over India, women have been falling off the employment map at an alarming rate, as the first part of this series explained. Female labour force participation of 34.8% in 1990 fell to 27% in 2013. Within South Asia in 2013, India had the lowest rate of women in employment after Pakistan, according to an April 2017 World bank report. Globally, only parts of the Arab world had worse rates.
 
Within India’s already sparse landscape, Haryana stands out as a bleak outpost.

When we think of  Haryana, we tend to think of its abysmal sex ratio of 836 girls for every 1,000 boys at birth among children born in the last five years, according to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS), 2015-16 — well below the national average of 919 and amongst the worst in the country.
 
In popular imagination, we tend also to associate Haryana with a particularly high rate of crimes against women. This isn’t always unjustified. In 2015, for instance, Haryana reported the country’s highest number of gang-rapes — 1.6 for every one lakh women — according to National Crime Records Bureau data. It had the second-highest rate of dowry deaths at 1.9 per lakh population and the third-highest rate in stalking women at 2.7 cases per lakh population.
 
Yet, this picture of Haryana as a state hostile to women is only partially true.
 
On other parameters, the state does well; better than the national average. Female literacy, for instance, at 75.4% is above the national average of 68.4%. And 45.8% of girls in the state have completed more than 10 years of schooling – also above the national average of 35.7%, finds NFHS 2015-16.
 

 
But, when it comes to employment, the figures falter. Just 17.6% of women in Haryana reported being paid cash for work in the preceding 12 months, below the Indian average of 24.6%, states NFHS 2015-16.
 
Why isn’t rising education leading to more women in the workplace? Why are Indian women falling off the employment map at such a steady and alarming pace? Over the next few months IndiaSpend will track declining female labor force participation through on-the-ground reports that seek to understand the various constraints that inhibit their employment and participation in the workforce.
 
“Haryana is a land of paradoxes. On one hand, women are encouraged to play rough contact sport like wrestling, boxing and judo, but on the other hand, they are discouraged from employment, particularly in the formal sector,” said Kanta Singh, UNDP’s state project head, looking after skilling programmes in Haryana and the National Capital Region. “For many girls and their parents, playing sport is a ticket to government jobs, money and fame.”
 
Education is a priority for girls and this is reflected in the states’s education indices. This doesn’t translate into jobs because, said Singh, everybody wants a government job and there are simply not enough to go around. “After completing an MA or a BA, they are still either not getting jobs or getting offers at very low salaries,” she said. Private sector jobs are generally looked down upon as low status jobs — or regarded as temporary jobs.
 
Moreover, jobs in such sectors as Information Technology, textiles and auto spare parts tend to be found in places like Gurugram or in the industrial belt of Panipat. “How is a woman from a far away village supposed to commute? If she gets a job in Gurugram, where is she supposed to stay? The lack of post-placement support such as affordable transportation and accommodation is an issue,” said Singh.
 
Where a woman’s veil takes pride of place
 
Sparks are flying at the Jindal steel factory at village Rohad, district Jhajjar. Here women have taken positions on the factory floor ever since the first batch of trainees set off on a four-month training course in May 2016. After going through the grind of safety and health, learning how to operate machines and rules of etiquette on the factory floor, 27 young women emerged, burnished and ready to work.
 
Just over a year later, 72 women have completed training as part of a public-private partnership between JSL Lifestyle and the Disha project — a partnership between UNDP, India Development Foundation and Xyneto. Of these, 62 are currently employed at the plant earning the legally mandated minimum wage of Rs 8,340 a month. Amongst those who didn’t sign, “some got married and others went in higher studies,” said Rakesh Kaushik, deputy manager HR at JSL Lifestyle Ltd. Two went on to better jobs at higher salaries, added Singh.
 
The factory, set up in 2003, had never seen women on its floor. None of the women had ever seen the inside of a factory. “They had no exposure to the outside world,” said Kaushik. But now that they are there, the work environment has changed for the better. “The other men cannot use abusive language in front of them. They are our mothers and sisters. So we have definitely benefited as employers.”
 
“The biggest change is in the women’s nature and confidence level,” said Pooja Sharma, welfare officer at the factory. One of four sisters from Rajasthan, Pooja is, unusually for the state, living as a paying guest at Bahadurgarh.  “I want to be recognized for my work,” she said.
 
Ever since the women started working here, the factory has added facilities like a toilet for them. Lunch is eaten at the employees’ canteen, but the men and women eat at separate times. “The women are not comfortable sitting with the men and eating with them. Plus different lunch hour timings ensures that the production line remains uninterrupted,” Kaushik said.
 
Haryana is a state where patriarchy is almost institutionalized. Its infamous khap panchayats – or caste councils — routinely make the news for issuing diktats on what girls may or may not wear and who they may or may not marry. A recent issue of a state-run magazine called Krishi Samvad featured a photograph of a veiled woman carrying cattle feed on her head. It’s caption read: Ghoonghat ki aan-baan, mahra Haryana ki pehchaan (the veil is the pride and identity of Haryana..
 
The challenge is not convincing women to study. The challenge is allowing them to work and voice their aspiration in a state steeped in patriarchy. “There’s a huge social investment to be made in convincing girls and women and their families why they need to work, become financially independent and overcome patriarchy,” said Singh.
 
At the steel factory where the women have evidently broken a glass ceiling, there is a clear divide between married and unmarried women. Nearly all the unmarried women said they were doing this job ‘for now’ and future career prospects would depend on their husbands after they got married.
 
“This is for my pocket money,” said Priti Khanna. “Whether I continue to work or not will be decided by my husband after my marriage.”
 
Jyoti Kadian who has a diploma in mechanical engineering from a polytechnic in Jhajjar is aware that time is running out for her. Engaged to be married to a navy man in November she knows her days at the factory are numbered. He doesn’t have a problem with her working but has made it clear that only a government job will be respectable enough. “In the village many people think that working in the private sector is not good. I’m trying hard for a government job, but it’s not easy to get,” she said.
 
The married women, on the other hand, said they were working for their children’s future.

 
 
It’s tough balancing work with household chores.
 
Monica Rohil joined the training programme because she said she wanted to secure the future of her 18-month-old daughter. With no plans to have more children, Monica’s day starts at 5 am when she wakes up, heats the milk for her daughter, packs her husband’s lunch that he takes to his job in another factory, cleans the utensils, washes the clothes, has a bath and then leaves for work at 8.45 am on the two-wheeler Activa Honda scooter gifted to her by her father. Her mother who lives close by looks after her daughter when she is away at work.
 
By the time she gets home from work, she gets in a bit of playtime with her daughter and then it’s time to cook dinner. Bed-time is rarely before 11 pm, sometimes midnight.
 
Does her husband help with the household chores? “Of course,” she said. “He plays with our daughter while I cook the dinner.” Then, as an afterthought she added, it also his job to fetch the water from the tanker that comes early every morning since the tap water in her locality is brackish.
 
Others like Rajesh Kashyap, mother of two children aged 14 and 10, work to supplement the household income: “Both my kids study in private school. We cannot make ends meet on one income.” She said her husband did not contribute to household chores because of his long working hours as a driver. “But my children help a lot,” she said.
 
Ask the women who aren’t working why they didn’t accept a job after training and the answer very often is that they are studying. Sonia Rohila who trained at the steel factory but turned down a job offer said she is studying for an entrance exam for B.Tech. Pinky (who only gave one name) says she too is busy with coaching classes but will ‘definitely’ get a job once she completes her B.Tech.
 
Ask Monica what she really loves about her job and her reply comes without hesitation: “It has given me an income, that is for sure. But more than that, it has given me an identity.”
 
(Namita Bhandare is a Delhi-based journalist who writes frequently on gender issues confronting India)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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